Technological advances associated with computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled users to instantly access a vast and diverse amount of information. As compared to traditional libraries or encyclopedias, information provided by way of the Web is decentralized in nature. To locate information of interest, a user can employ a search engine that facilitates finding content stored on local or remote computers. Search engines can assist in locating information on the public Web, intranets, personal computers, and the like. Typical search engines can retrieve a list of references (e.g., search results) matching inputted criteria provided by the user. For instance, the user can perform a query by providing a word or phrase to the search engine and in response the search engine can return a list of search results matching the entered word, phrase, or a portion thereof. To further specify search queries, many search engines support utilization of Boolean terms such as, for instance, AND, OR and NOT as well as provisions related to a distance between keywords.
Due to the quantity of available web pages, search engines attempt to provide relevant search results in response to receiving a query. For instance, search engines commonly rank web pages based upon popularity, relevance, or authoritativeness; thus, search engines can provide search results ordered according to such ranking. However, a set of search results yielded by the search engine and provided to a user may fail to include and/or provide a high ranking to results of interest to the user. For instance, if the search engine returns a limited number of results with the highest determined rankings, results of interest to the user may not be included in the limited set, and thus, further user input by way of manual refining of the query can be utilized. By way of illustration, the user can employ the search engine to find information associated with the band Traffic. Accordingly, a query can be performed with the word “traffic,” which can yield a large number of results; however, a multitude of results related to automobile traffic in various locations, movies entitled Traffic, air traffic control, companies with the word traffic included in their names, and the like can be returned. Thus, the user may have to evaluate numerous results (e.g., by traversing through a number of pages including results, selecting hyperlinks associated with particular results, . . . ) in hopes of locating information associated with the band Traffic and/or manually narrow the original query (e.g., by way of refining the query to be “traffic band”, . . . ) to obtain more relevant results.
The results provided by a search engine are typically the same for all disparate users. Search engines typically fail to differentiate disparate users and therefore do not take into account differing user needs, circumstances, interests, contexts, and the like. Accordingly, if two different users enter the same query, the search engine typically will provide the same search results regardless of differences in user interests, history, time, day, device effectuating the search, etc. However, as the amount of available content continues to increase, searching for information of interest can become more difficult and/or time consuming in view of typical search engines providing uniform results in response to the same query performed by disparate users with differing interests, contexts, etc.